A crusading left-wing activist who fought on behalf of the hungry and forgotten, Dorothy Day (1897–1980) was the cofounder of the Catholic Worker newspaper, a powerful voice for social change and pacifism during and after the Great Depression. During her lifetime, Day’s politics were considered so extreme that she was monitored by the FBI, but many Catholics considered her a hero, and she was officially proposed for sainthood in 2000.
Day was born in Brooklyn and moved frequently as a child; she was living in San Francisco in 1906 and survived that year’s earthquake. Her parents were not religious—and, for the first several decades of Day’s life, neither was she. As a young college student, she became enamored with socialist politics, dropped out of school in 1916, and worked as a reporter for a radical newspaper, the Call.
During the 1920s, Day gravitated toward radical political circles in New York City. She adopted a Bohemian lifestyle, lived with multiple lovers, and had an illegal abortion, an experience she would later say she regretted.
Pregnant again in 1927, Day experienced a religious awakening and converted to Catholicism. For the rest of her life, she would remain a deeply devout and theologically conservative Catholic, enthusiastically backing the church’s position against abortion.
But she also remained committed to her political ideals, and she combined the two in May 1933, when she started the Catholic Worker with Peter Maurin (1877–1949). The two hoped to spark a movement of socially involved, left-wing Catholics; in addition to the newspaper, they founded shelters for the homeless, clinics, and hospices.
Day was a controversial figure even among Catholics, thanks to her strong leftist and antiwar beliefs. She opposed the draft during World War II and agitated passionately against the Vietnam War; according to her New York Times obituary, Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) once referred to Day as “the first Hippie.”
After her death at age eighty-three, Day was proposed for sainthood by John Cardinal O’Connor (1920–2000), the archbishop of New York City.